State District Judge Jan Krocker's voice cracked as she talked Tuesday about a Hispanic teenager in jail persuading a grizzled and tattooed former white supremacist to get mental health help earlier this year.

"Somewhere in the jail, their paths crossed," Krocker told a courtroom packed with mental health professionals and members of the criminal justice community. "And this young Hispanic kid talked this old guy, who had been in the Aryan Brotherhood, into getting help."

Krocker and others celebrated the official opening of Harris County's felony mental health court, which started putting mentally ill defendants on probation instead of sending them to jail in May.

Krocker has been working to get a special court to oversee felony cases of defendants diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression since 2009.

"The youngest participant was 17 years old when he came in, the oldest is 61, and all of them are very sick," Krocker told the group that included County Judge Ed Emmett, Precinct 1 Commissioner El Franco Lee and state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston.

She said the program, paid for by an initial federal grant of $500,000 with matching funds from the county, has 45 people on probation. Krocker said the program has room for 80 probationers.

Defendants with pending criminal cases who agree to the probation meet with Krocker and mental health professionals in the courtroom, weekly at first, to coordinate social services and show they are medicated. If they stop abiding by the rules, their probation can be revoked.

The first 40 on the intensive probation, Krocker said, have spent a total of 10,600 days in jail since 2006. She said it cost taxpayers about $600,000 for them to cycle through being arrested, going to jail where they are medicated and released, stopping their medication and being arrested again.

Statewide, Whitmire told the group, 18,000 inmates take psychiatric medication. Of the 153,000 people incarcerated in Texas, Whitmire said, 32,000 were in a mental health system before they ended up in prison.

"Those 32,000 people are in our penitentiaries, at a cost of millions of dollars, because they couldn't get the mental health services they need," Whitmire said. "When we solve the problems of the mental health defendant, we're preventing the next criminal act."

Emmett said most families, including his own, have been affected by mental illness.

"It's eye-opening," Emmett said. "When you think of where they might end up."

He said specialty courts, like drug courts and veterans courts, recognize that people with mental health issues, even those who commit misdeeds and crimes, are not like other people accused of felonies.

"They're different," Emmett said. "They deserve to be treated differently. They deserve to be treated as individuals."

He said public policy is "growing up" when it comes to dealing with the mentally ill, who for years have gone in and out the jail's revolving door.

"This court is a manifestation of that growth," Emmett said. "Hopefully it's just the beginning."